Blood Brothers A decade after their epic ring trilogy, Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe are still bound together, hostages to their dreams and delusions

Each is sentenced in his own way now, though the terms are roughly the same. Riddick Bowe must do his time, 18 months, at a minimum-security facility in Cumberland, Md. Evander Holyfield, who figures he's looking at the same stretch, is held on a hill outside Atlanta, at his $20 million estate, the one with lakes and horses and a bowling alley. The contrast in their conditions of confinement aside, one is no freer than the other, not really; both are in lockup, their sentences handed down (little did they know) more than a decade ago when they began one of boxing's most thrilling trilogies. It is not so strange, given the depth of their partnership, that they be conjoined in comparable miseries. Everybody always said they were made for each other.

And how comparable are those miseries, anyway? Pretty comparable. Bowe, long ago battered into retirement, is finally going to jail on a five-year-old charge of interstate domestic violence, filed after he gathered up his estranged wife and five children and, without any more of a plan than that, drove them to a McDonald's, where his wife used a cellphone and called police from the rest room. Holyfield, though righteous and law-abiding and a lot more comfortable financially than Bowe, is manacled just as securely by competitive zeal, an ambition that grows ever more foolish--even alarming--now that he's turned 40. Neither man is allowed contentment. Each is doomed by ambitions that grow ever more unattainable.

Their mostly heroic 32 rounds--a seesaw story of brutal bravery--offer them no parole at this remove, no time off for so violent an exposition of character, in which each fighter was tested (and proved). How did Holyfield come back in the 10th round of the first fight? How did Bowe get back up in the rubber match? The reward they might expect for their courage, amply displayed in all three fights, is instead a penalty. Both men are frustrated in the long aftermath, their rightful glory held in abeyance. Maybe in 18 months is what they're thinking, hoping.

In the days before his confinement began on March 14, Bowe was examining exactly this phenomenon, the further postponement of his happiness. He had decided to work with it; his time in jail would become an extended training camp, the one he couldn't possibly have undertaken on his own. It would be a prelude to his final deliverance. While still indignant that something so pure as his love of family could have been perverted into a federal crime, he was also relieved. "I'm going to be running and eating the right food," he promised, so puffy and bloated that even he recognized that his fitness depended upon judicial decree. "Actually, they're doing me a big favor."

It was a snowy late-winter morning, and neighbors were all outside shoveling sidewalks as Bowe gave a visitor a tour of his compound in suburban Maryland. The snow on his sidewalk alone remained undisturbed. At noon he was easing into the day; his current wife, Terri--they were married in February 2000--had just braided his hair. "I want everybody to know I'm O.K., things of that nature," he said, explaining what he hoped to accomplish with the interview. "That my speech is good, what have you." He was rightly concerned about the public's overall impression of his health, since his lawyers had offered, at a sentencing hearing, evidence of damage to a portion of his brain. "They say I have the frontal lobes, but I need to express to the world I don't have that," Bowe said. "I speak well, and so on and so forth."

He also worried that his many fans might think that, because of all his legal troubles (which included a divorce from his first wife), he was broke, that his onetime fortune of $20 million was spent. "Don't worry about ol' Bowe," he said. For proof he tramped out to his garage, which is across from his Graceland-style gym, which is not far from the BIG DADDY hedge--all, even the shrubbery, artifacts of his brief and long-ago championship--and counted down rows of shiny and expensive automobiles, 12 of them. "So ol' Bowe's not doing so bad," he said. Then he remembered the Bentley and the Mercedes that were in the shop. He brightened. Ol' Bowe's doing better than even he thought.

"You know what I've missed," he said, suddenly, taking stock of his situation as if for the first time. "I miss talking to guys such as yourself, running with the fellas, being the man, hearing the cheering. 'Hey, champ!'" He surveyed his spread, no longer so cheerful. "I miss the whole kit and caboodle."

Not so far away, in Georgia, is Bowe's collaborator in boxing's best back-and-forth, Holyfield. He also is minus the champion's kit and caboodle, also minus the freedom to fully enjoy his life. With Holyfield, it's different, freedomwise. His jail is virtual and self-imposed. Fresh off yet another defeat (he has won just two of his last seven fights), he entertains a visitor at his palatial estate above a highway of strip malls (Evander Holyfield Highway). He plots another comeback. He is chained to boxing by his pride. "By 2004," he announces, "I'll be champ again. The end is soon."

He is wealthy beyond imagining, after a career of pay-per-view blockbusters and hilariously skinflint living (palace aside), and he's fitter than ever. But he's also often injured, and his performances are increasingly lackluster, if dangerously determined. He sits sideways, his legs draped over the arm of a leather chair in his "office," a ballroom-sized wing off a hotel-lobby-style entrance. Magazines with his face on the cover ("Looks like a gargoyle," Bowe used to say) are placed neatly on coffee tables. All the cover dates are around 1999. "People don't understand about finishing," Holyfield says. "You are what you finish. I see the finish--not how, but when. Won't be long now."

In other words, with good behavior, both Bowe and Holyfield, old friends, will come out into the sunlight together. Perhaps they will visit each other, as they did in the old days, Holyfield calling Bowe "Reddick," reprimanding him for his fleet of cars, and Bowe standing behind Holyfield, pretending to whack him, his buddies doubling over from laughter until Holyfield turns around--"What the ... ?"--and finds Bowe looking all innocent, surprised. It would be nice to think that their destinies, pounded out in those Las Vegas fights in a gruel of blood and snot, would finally leave them at peace. Wouldn't it?

By 1992 Bowe was regarded as one of the finest physical specimens ever to come down boxing's pike. He was 6'5" and 235 pounds, the new carrier class of heavyweight, and he could jab with the best of them, even fight inside. There had been questions about his desire, though, ever since his Olympic silver medal finish in '88, a loss to Lennox Lewis that seemed to suggest there was quit in him. And his Clown Bomber antics, while crowd-friendly, were not always reassuring. But mostly there was a sense that the heavyweight division was about to complete the transition from Muhammad Ali's era to Bowe's.

Trainer Emanuel Steward was agog at the completeness of Bowe's package. "I told him he was looking like the perfect, perfect heavyweight," Steward says. In addition to size and talent, Bowe had the advantage of Eddie Futch, an old school trainer who alone was able to inspire Bowe to resist the deadly sins of sloth and gluttony. Bowe called him Papa Smurf and would do just about anything for him--even, it was said at the time, roadwork.

Bowe's run-ins with the police over domestic abuse calls (once in the week before he went to jail) make it hard to characterize him as entirely happy-go-lucky. But at the time of his ascension, his goofy good nature was almost a national treasure. His wit was exaggerated in the press, but his playfulness was, if anything, underreported. Once, while the referee was trying to raise his hand after an important victory, Bowe spotted Bill Cosby at ringside. Immediately he began jiggling his head like a dashboard dog, the ol' Cos gesture.

And he had a way of reworking reality to fit his Pollyanna needs. Even though he grew up amid the violence of Brownsville--the same Brooklyn neighborhood that spawned Mike Tyson--he steadfastly recalled a Leave It to Beaver childhood. One of Bowe's brothers died of AIDS, a sister was a crack addict, another sister died when a junkie tried to steal her welfare check. Riddick was one of 13 siblings, and as a young amateur he lived in an apartment complex where anybody interested in visiting him had to negotiate stairways manned by guards with automatic weapons. There were such long lines of crack retailing that one of Bowe's prospective managers thought he had stumbled upon a soup kitchen. Bowe's recollection? "Oh, we had a lot of fun. If I could just go back to being between 10 and 16, I'd never grow up."

Bowe put a good face on everything; it was part of his charm. Tyson terrorized the neighborhood through which Bowe dutifully walked his mother, Big Dot, to her factory job every night. Yet when Bowe racks his brain for a picture of the fierce young hoodlum, he comes up with Huck Finn: "Good ol' Mike. Big for his age, and he always had a bag of cookies with him."

Everybody loved Bowe, even Holyfield, who used him as a sparring partner early in their careers. "Not a mean bone in his body," says Holyfield, "always clowning around, imitating Ali."

But then they met, both of them undefeated, for Holyfield's heavyweight title in November 1992. Holyfield, an overachieving, pumped-up cruiserweight, had been cementing his reputation as a well-paid warrior with wins over Buster Douglas, George Foreman, Larry Holmes and Bert Cooper. The rewards had been such--$56 million for those four fights--that he began toying with the idea of building an estate, something grand. "As a kid, nothing was big enough," Holyfield says. "Everybody there, table not big enough, have to sit on the floor on newspapers just to eat." Holyfield, alone among his contemporaries, did not believe in debt (or manager's cuts or even high payrolls). He expected to fully fund, out of Bowe's demise, the construction of a truly compensatory home.

Bowe was hoping for similar rewards. He was not the miser Holyfield was, and he believed that his slightest sacrifice ought to be rewarded, usually with a new car. His manager, the combative Rock Newman, had to subvert many a retirement ("Riddick retired every single training camp, actually," says Newman, now estranged from Bowe) with promises of fresh wheels. Glossy pictures of a burgundy BMW decorated one camp. But what Bowe was toying with before the Holyfield fight, for which he'd get $8 million to the champ's minimum $15 million, was the purchase of his own apartment complex in Brownsville. "I remember back in '87, walking through a complex, thinking, If they ever sold it, I'd like to buy it for my family," he said. "Put all my brothers and sisters, everybody close to me, put 'em right there. Like a big happy family."

That fight would provide for all the dreams of both fighters. There would be championship belts and money, and their families would be secure and intact forever. And best of all--ask either man--the fight would be easy!

"I knew he could fight," Holyfield says now, reconsidering his complacency, "but I just knew he'd run out of gas. I mean, this is my sparring partner. I see a kid. And I'm all grown up. I was extremely confident. I didn't care how hard he worked, I worked harder."

Bowe, just 25 and five years Holyfield's junior, thought he was superior, not only in size and skill but also in experience. "Remember," Bowe says, "I'd had 31 fights to his 28. I must say, I didn't have much respect for him."

Nobody else thought it would be so easy. Seth Abraham, then head of Time Warner Sports, remembers ringside voltage as quite high. "I was thinking, Something exciting's going to happen. It was very magical, right before the fight, like something was passing through the crowd."

The fight took both men to the brink, though it was Holyfield who finally went over. He was dumbfounded by Bowe's reserve. "The difference was that walking man," says Holyfield. Walking man? Still sitting sideways in his chair, Holyfield paddles his feet in the air. Did he mean Dick Gregory? "Yeah, the walking man," he says. In fact, the comic-activist had been brought on board as Bowe's nutritionist, and he had pared the fighter down to a weigh-in 235 pounds from 281 two months earlier.

Holyfield admits that he was further unnerved when, after nine grueling rounds, he looked into Bowe's corner and saw him "joking and laughing." Bowe was indeed mugging for the cameras. "He had all this energy," Holyfield says.

The champion's strategy for the famous 10th round was almost Bowesque. "I'd go out and coast, then I'd finish strong," he says. "So I lowered my head to his chest, I was just looking to rest, and all of a sudden he hits me with an uppercut. He hit me so hard, so hard. And then he was knocking me pillar to post. I kept saying, 'Lord, help me.'"

Bowe rained 40 punches on Holyfield during that barrage. "Oh, I put a thing on him," Bowe says proudly. But a minute into the round Holyfield, instead of expiring, regained his composure. "I was thinking maybe I should just get out of there, just quit," says Holyfield. "It seemed like five, 10 minutes. But my whole thing is just not to quit." And then he let loose with a hook, combinations and uppercuts, and Bowe, truly winded, was unable to fend him off.

"How beautiful it is," says Holyfield. "You almost be gone, and then you're landing big punches."

Then--and here's the majesty of that round--Bowe surged back. Having taken a 14-shot fusillade in 15 seconds, he ended the round with his own fury. He suddenly remembered their billing; he was "a big ol' Great Dane from Brooklyn, Holyfield a junkyard dog from Georgia," he says. "If you look at the tape, you can see me talking to him. I'm saying, 'Good dog, good dog.'"

Bowe won that fight on the judges' scorecards by wide margins. Even so, it was he who retired to his room immediately afterward to nurse his bruises in a 45-minute bath, and Holyfield who went dancing at a postfight party. All Bowe could do to celebrate was to watch the fight on tape, every once in a while exclaiming "Yowser!" at the action. Later Holyfield telephoned him to remind him of his new financial position. "He said everyone is going to try and get into my back pocket, and that I should put my money away for a rainy day," Bowe says. "What a gladiator."

Holyfield was devastated. He had never before been beaten, much less beaten up. Worse, the scores suggested that "I wasn't even in the fight," he says. He announced his retirement, canceled plans for his estate and got involved with his eight-year-old son's football program.

Bowe, meanwhile, was enjoying the spoils of championship, the whole kit and caboodle. Newman took him on a world tour, to visit Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, the starving children of Somalia. This was well beyond the usual victory lap. This was Ali-level excess. Also, Bowe finally financed his compound, which was just a nice house, with a gym-playroom for himself and his kids and a 12-car garage for his growing collection of automobiles.

It was a heady time. The summer after he'd beaten Holyfield, Bowe stood in an upstairs bedroom, contemplating his success. Champion of the world. "I said to myself, What more can you ask?" he recalls.

From a distance of 10 years, even he can recognize the hubris. "Now, why did I say that?" he says, laughing.

Newman got him some soft touches, Michael Dokes and Jesse Ferguson, whom Bowe flattened in a round each, earning $15 million for the two. HBO dangled a $100 million contract, and, well, what more could you ask? Bowe was riding so high, he no longer required official sanction of his happiness. At Newman's instigation, he shed the WBC belt, unceremoniously dropping it into a garbage can before the assembled press. And you could say his already marginal self-discipline was further eroded by success. "To make a long story short," Bowe says, "yes, I did eat all the Twinkies I could. Not to mention that my momma now lived down the street and would cook me an apple pie whenever I wanted it. I deserved it. I worked so hard."

Holyfield did not retire for long. His thing, as he says, is not to quit-even when logic dictates surrender. He contacted Steward about training him for a rematch, and Steward did not sugarcoat it. "He's a better boxer than you," he told Holyfield. "He fights better inside, weird as that is, and even more incredible, has a better jab. This will be your most difficult assignment yet." Pretty much everybody agreed; Holyfield was a 6-to-1 underdog.

Steward, knowing that Holyfield was a nimble dancer, hatched a plan that would win the rematch and the two remaining heavyweight titles. It was all footwork. Bowe, having again blown up to more than 280 pounds before camp, weighed in at 246, 11 more than for the first meeting almost exactly a year before. But all anybody remembers from the second fight is Fan Man, a motor-propelled paraglider who dropped into the outdoor ring behind Caesars Palace in the seventh round. The paraglider, James Miller, later complained that even though there were two great heavyweights in the ring, he was "the only guy who got knocked out." Bowe's handlers pummeled him good, and, disentangled from his flying apparatus, Fan Man was removed from the ring on a stretcher.

Looking back, both fighters attribute the disruption to a conspiracy, although their versions are entirely different. "If you look at certain individuals around the ring," says Bowe, "they had walkie-talkies. [Fan Man] knew exactly when to come into the ring. We get to stand around 20 minutes in the cold, and here's what kills me: Holyfield's corner has covers, blankets and sheets. C'mon, man! Please! It took me five minutes to get warm again. That's not a conspiracy? You tell me, what fight you know, somebody has a quilt at ringside. I was bamboozled, hoodwinked."

Holyfield has been thinking about it all these years too. "I was hitting him at will," he says of the pre-Fan Man rounds. "I was busting him up. And what I heard later was that if I'd knocked him out early, a lot of people would have lost money. What I heard, woulda broke the bank. Broke the bank! And you know, he did float up there a long time. Why he come down then?"

In any case, it was an extremely close fight, with a draw on one of the cards and Holyfield winning by just one point on the second card and two points on the third. If it substituted intrigue and paranoia for the first fight's magnificent 10th round, this rematch was no less noble. The two men were still standing at the bell, clawing at each other, their desperation now obscured in history, but no less real. "An easy fight?" says Holyfield. "Nooooo!"

Reassured by his $12 million payday and the prospect of other big ones now that he was champ again, Holyfield broke ground on his 54,000-square-foot house. "They had to dynamite the earth, on account of the rock," he says. "They had a 30-foot hole dug by the time I lost to Michael Moorer [five months later]. Couldn't turn back then."

Bowe's defeat was celebrated in the boxing industry. Not that anybody wished him ill, but it was now payback time for the abrasive Newman. Trash a title? The establishment delighted at the comeuppance.

Had Bowe retained his belts, he could have run the table. Tyson was still in prison on his rape conviction, and anybody who wanted heavyweight respect, not to mention money, would have had to pass through Bowe. But now? With just one extremely close loss to a two-time heavyweight champion, Bowe was unranked--unranked!--by all three of the alphabet organizations.

Explained Don King, who was expected to march Tyson out of prison and into the rankings over which he had such influence, "Herein lies an immigrant who is capable of treasonous activity. So he was deported." King made no mystery of the treasonous agent, either, blaming Newman. "Any sane man knows [Bowe's] the best. But he's got this manager, here's a guy who burnt every bridge and then set dynamite under them." What could you do?

Holyfield was soon out in the cold too. After losing his titles to Moorer, he was found to have a congenital heart defect. His next retirement was immediate and final. His estate, possibly a room or two smaller than planned, would be paid for out of savings. The prospect of a rubber match with Bowe was dim.

But miracles do happen. In Holyfield's case it involved the laying on of hands. An actual, nonmetaphorical miracle, compliments of the evangelist Benny Hinn, whose healing paved the way for the resumption of his boxing career. The Nevada State Athletic Commission required a battery of tests from the Mayo Clinic (not that the commissioners were skeptical) and accepted the doctors' reversal of Holyfield's earlier diagnosis. He was cleared to fight.

King, meanwhile, began to gather the heavyweight titles and keep them on ice for Tyson's return to the ring. Neither Bowe nor Holyfield fit into his plans, so the two had nobody to fight but each other. Three years after their first fight, to the week, they entered the ring together--somewhat reluctantly, as the two had grown quite fond of each other. "I think I'm starting to like you," Bowe told Holyfield in that period of time that encourages prefight hostility. For his part Holyfield told the press he admired Bowe for his attention to his children. Now he admits it was more than that. The two boxers were on Arsenio Hall's late-night show to promote the fight, and Bowe began bragging on his wife, Judy, his high school sweetheart.

"I looked out there," says Holyfield, "and it was no woman out of a magazine. She had on these big glasses, kind of homey-like. But she was beautiful to him. 'That's my girl, I love her so.' I was thinking, He has loyalty, integrity."

By then they had visited each other countless times and probably played more pool together than they had boxed. It was impossible to muster hatred. In one prefight interview, the two seated together, Holyfield managed to complain of low blows and other infractions in their two fights. (He was probably still stung by Bowe's "gargoyle" characterization, which Bowe had defended as "nothing personal, just an opinion.") Bowe smirked into his mitt. They had become the Odd Couple.

Behind the scenes, though, it got strange. Bowe decided that $8 million wasn't enough, and he disappeared from camp "for longer than usual," says Newman. He returned only when Newman agreed to give him $2 million out of his own cut. "He said, 'What's a million or two between buddies?'" says Newman.

Holyfield says he was five weeks into training when he began to "taste iron in my mouth and get chills." A doctor told him he had hepatitis and advised him to call off the fight. Holyfield said, "It ain't that bad." But it got worse. He recalls thinking as he trained in Houston, Now I know why people contemplate suicide. I never felt so sick.

Holyfield says he didn't spar more than twice in the three weeks before the fight. Of course, it's well-known that Holyfield doesn't spar any more than he has to even when he's healthy. It's also known that Holyfield tends to contract ailments after the fact, especially after a loss. But he swears he sleepwalked through training. His fight plan was based on a short fight, one way or another. "I knew I didn't have time on my side," he says.

The third fight was a fitting capstone to their relationship, even if neither man was at his best. It was distinguished mainly by Holyfield's struggle to stay in the fight--he was thinking of quitting by the fifth round, although HBO's George Foreman speculated that Holyfield would leave the ring "in a pine box"--and by his staggering knockdown of Bowe in the sixth. Bowe, a 3-to-1 favorite after showing up for the fight at a trim 240 pounds, was as much startled as hurt. "I thought, That ain't right," he says. But he was hurt.

"What I need to tell you," says Bowe, "I wasn't myself for the next two rounds. I don't remember anything, didn't feel anything, didn't hear anything. I felt I was in a dream, I guess."

Holyfield thought the fight was over--hoped it was over--after that lunging left hook flattened Bowe. "I said, Oh, thank you," he says. "But that seemed like the longest count. And then when he get up at eight, and it was still early in the round, I got two minutes to put pressure on him, but I didn't have no energy. It just leaked out of me." Ringsiders believed a tap on Bowe's shoulder might have finished him for good, yet Holyfield was unable to press his advantage. It remains Holyfield's greatest disappointment, what he believes was a lapse in will. "It showed me something about myself," he says.

Then, astonishingly, Bowe returned in the eighth round, knocked Holyfield down once, then again with such finality that the ref didn't even bother with a count. Their splendid series was over, and, removed from each other, they seemed to lose their bearings, bit by bit.

What figured to open doors for Bowe and close them for Holyfield did the reverse. The loss briefly played to Holyfield's benefit, while the win seemed to announce Bowe's self-destruction. Their trilogy continued to offer back-and-forth even after its conclusion.

Holyfield was immediately placed in boxing's anteroom of retirement. Couldn't finish Bowe? Holyfield was a shot fighter, a diagnosis confirmed in his next bout, when he struggled mightily to beat Bobby Czyz in what was supposed to have been a walkover. But Holyfield refused to retire without his title--all of them, actually--disappointing everybody but King.

King had been running out of fodder in Tyson's comeback. The quality of the competition had been dispiriting, almost fraudulent, and it was important to throw in a quality name for Tyson's credentialing. Holyfield's marquee value, plus his obviously diminished skills, jumped him to the top of the list. He was legit and, better yet, no longer dangerous.

Boxing history followed: Holyfield easily defused Tyson's bullying tactics in their first fight, in 1996, scoring an 11th-round knockout of the bewildered fighter to win the WBA crown. Seven months later, in the rematch, Holyfield won by disqualification when Tyson bit his ear (both of them, actually).

But Holyfield could never gather all his titles about him and achieve the send-off for which he was so desperate. He failed, in two fights with IBF and WBC champion Lennox Lewis in 1999, to consolidate the championship, and ever since, he has been nipping about the edges of the heavyweight division, trying to pick off a vacated title here or there. So far he's been held off by the likes of John Ruiz and Chris Byrd, neither a match for him in his prime, and his quest looks more and more hopeless.

When a visitor suggests that time, finally, is running out, Holyfield reacts with puzzlement. "Time run out?" he says. "How do time run out? Time don't run out." The reason he didn't "bust Chris Byrd up," he says, was simple: a shoulder injury. He's since had surgery and is good to go again. Any other characterization of his failure is way off. "Not 'cause I'm old," he insists. "That [fight] was just a bump in the road."

With three titles out there, and one of them held by bulked-up light heavyweight Roy Jones Jr., it would be ridiculous to think that Holyfield will never get another shot at his precious belts, even at 41. At some point, though, it will be just as ridiculous to countenance that shot. "It's time to worry," says Abraham.

If Holyfield is edging toward disaster, trying to recapture history that is becoming dangerously ancient, then Bowe has long since crossed over the line. For his first fight after Holyfield, Bowe gorged to 252 pounds and was savagely beaten about the ring by Andrew Golota. It would surely have been Bowe's second loss had not Golota been disqualified for repeated low blows. Their rematch, with Bowe trimmed too far down, to 235 pounds, was worse. Golota hammered Bowe helpless, more than 300 shots to the head, but lost again after more low blows. Bowe believes he was doped by someone in his camp, bamboozled again. But soon after, at the insistence of Newman, who prepared a HEALTH VS. WEALTH chart to make his case for quitting (he even secured a $1 million goodwill-ambassador contract from HBO), Bowe announced his retirement.

On the virtual eve of his imprisonment, Bowe walks around his gym and addresses his regrets. Number 1: retirement. "I was ill-advised, things of that nature," he says. "I believe if I kept fighting, I wouldn't have been frustrated, a lot of things wouldn't have taken place. My career ended totally different from what I thought. I was just 29!"

Two months after retiring, in a bizarre career swing, Bowe joined the Marine Corps. He had been obsessed with the military for a long time. "Ever since I was a kid," he says, "and saw this John Wayne movie. I remember him ordering, 'Ease out.' That's what I wanted to do." But Bowe thought his drill instructor was zeroing in on him, the commands too personal, and he walked away. He had lasted 11 days. "So," he says, "that's my second regret."

With Bowe brooding at home, his marriage to his childhood sweetheart grew tense, to the point that they separated in June 1997. Judy moved with the children to North Carolina. Bowe retired to his mother's basement. "I sat down there 20 hours a day," he says. "I'd sleep three days at a time." Of all things, he began losing weight--40 pounds in three months. "A bug came up on me," Bowe says.

Finally, Bowe says, "I decided to stop being a punk, what have you, to go down there and pull my family back together." Equipped with pepper spray, duct tape, handcuffs and a knife, he sailed forth in his Navigator to North Carolina, snatched three of his children from a bus stop and then collected Judy at home, in her pajamas, and the two other children for the drive back to Maryland. Bowe admits the plan got hazy after that. "My thing was, They'll see I'm changed, I'm O.K.," he says. "I guess that didn't happen."

At her first opportunity Judy called police, and Riddick fell into a legal quagmire that has lasted five years. In the 1999 sentencing hearing, a defense team including Johnnie Cochran produced testimony that Bowe had sustained brain damage (to the frontal lobe), had a low IQ (79) and suffered from a diminished capacity to make good decisions. The judge bought the argument and sentenced Bowe to minimal prison time on the condition that Bowe not fight. But that sentencing was later set aside on appeal, and an 18-month prison term was finally imposed earlier this year. "So that's my other regret," says Bowe, sitting on his ring apron. "Getting married."

Bowe was eager, though, to begin his term and begin the comeback, his path eased by forced discipline, the kind only the late Papa Smurf had previously provided. "It's a blessing," he says of the sentence. It wouldn't be long before he would once more be enjoying the champ's kit and caboodle, "the excitement of coming from a fight, putting the tape in, watching myself in action. The things you looked forward to, and then they were done. Man, I've missed that."

A month before he went to jail, Bowe visited the Nevada State Athletic Commission in Las Vegas to apprise it of his plans. "Same old Bowe," says Marc Ratner, the executive director, chuckling. "He wanted to talk about Fan Man. Said it was a conspiracy."

Holyfield, meanwhile, was talking up plans for a title fight with Jones, who has been mentioning him as a possible opponent, perhaps lured as much by the dollars that Holyfield's name still generates as by his degeneration as a contender. Holyfield has worked this scenario to his advantage before; who's to say he couldn't again?

"You'll see," says Holyfield, still sitting sideways in his leather chair. "In 2004, when I'm champ again, people will say, 'He been champ five times, took all that long for him to reach his goal. Look. Now he's happy.'"

B/W PHOTO: HOLYFIELD (LEFT) BY GREG FOSTERB/W PHOTO: BOWE BY ELI REED/MAGNUMFOUR COLOR PHOTOS: JOHN BIEVERTHREE COLOR PHOTOS: RICHARD MACKSONCOLOR PHOTO: RICHARD MACKSON SORE WINNER Bowe won fight one but was too banged up to party like Holyfield.COLOR PHOTO: JOHN IACONO (PARTY) [See caption above]COLOR PHOTO: GEORGE TIEDEMANN/GT IMAGES CRASH LANDING After interrupting fight two, Miller was throttled by Bowe's crew.COLOR PHOTO: JIM MIDDLETON HOME RUN Only after he won the rematch did Holyfield begin building his mansion.COLOR PHOTO: JOHN IACONO (LEFT) CUPID'S BOWE After divorcing Judy (left), Riddick tied the knot with Terri.COLOR PHOTO: ELI REED/MAGNUM [See caption above]COLOR PHOTO: JOHN IACONO REBOUND Bowe hit the canvas in the third fight but got up to score a knockout.COLOR PHOTO: V.J. LOVERO CURTAINS After being KO'd in fight three, Holyfield took comfort in Bowe's embrace.

The first fight took both men to the brink, though it was Holyfield who finally went over. He was dumbfounded by Bowe's reserve.

The rematch was no less noble. The two men were still standing at the bell, clawing at each other. "An easy fight?" says Holyfield. "Nooooo!"

Holyfield is wealthy beyond imagining, after a career of pay-per-view blockbusters and hilariously skinflint living (palace aside).

Bowe put a good face on everything; it was part of his charm. "Not a mean bone in his body," says Holyfield, "always clowning around."

After the knockdown, Bowe says, "I wasn't myself for two rounds. I didn't feel anything, didn't hear anything. I felt I was in a dream."

Their splendid series was over, and, removed from each other, Bowe and Holyfield seemed to lose their bearings, bit by bit.